“ In the subway the trains move so swiftly you can never catch your breath. Outside the grimy window that’s a reflecting surface like a mirror mostly there are the rushing tunnel walls, that slow as the… Joyce Carol Oates
“ In that way you recall, suddenly, sharply, in daylight, a trace of a dream of the previous night--but even as you recall it, it begins to fade. Joyce Carol Oates
“ In so sick a society as ours how is it possible that any citizen is healthy, at all? Joyce Carol Oates
“ If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything. Joyce Carol Oates
“ I had been reading Wittgenstein. There are no philosophical problems, only linguistic misunderstandings. Was this so? If so, why write at such length about it? I could understand [his] attraction to s… Joyce Carol Oates
“ I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint. For rarely do you know what you want. Even after you've done it you can't say clearly i… Joyce Carol Oates
“ I am thinking of having a T-shirt printed: Yes my husband died. Yes I am very sad. Yes you are kind to offer condolences. Now can we change the subject? Joyce Carol Oates
“ Great handfuls of her life were being stolen from her and she would never be able to retrieve them. Joyce Carol Oates
“ Como isso acontece, você gosta tanto de alguém — ama alguém, talvez — e depois, não muito tempo depois, o que sente é ódio? Um ódio horrível e funesto? Um ódio de vontade de matar? Por quê? Joyce Carol Oates
“ As if whoever it was held that camera was her closest friend. Or maybe it was the camera that was her closest friend. Joyce Carol Oates
“ And the thought consoled me, as it does now: everything you believe you have imagined is real. You have only to outlive it. Joyce Carol Oates
“ No one knew what to do with Ariah Erskine, who refused to behave as others wished her to behave. Joyce Carol Oates
“ Grip of Paradox. A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons—Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy. Joyce Carol Oates
“ You have hardened your heart against your American cousin. It was courageous in the memoir to state so clearly how you had to harden your heart against so much, to survive. Americans believe that suff… Joyce Carol Oates
“ You could be thoroughly an intellectual while not surrendering maleness; you could not be so totally intellectual and not surrender some degree of femaleness. Joyce Carol Oates
“ You can think of your life as the mistakes you made that catch up with you finally. Joyce Carol Oates
“ Yet within seconds she summoned her steely will, this will that so impressed Dirk Burnaby, for he’d never encountered anything like it in his life, establishing where she was, and why. The bad dream w… Joyce Carol Oates
